What BOARD GAME(s) have you been playing?

I played Roads & Boats today and really liked it. I have a soft spot for games like Railroad Tycoon (the PC game) that combine logistics and building and this is exactly that.

It's a shame the game is so expensive because I would love to own it.

Mythic Battles had a significant balance adjustment with the 1.5 version. Almost half the units had some kind of change, and it was all for the better. The minis are awesome, creating/drafting a team is great fun, and the gameplay offers the great option of either killing the enemy leader or grabbing the gems on the board for the win. Storing it sucks, I can never take it anywhere. And its pricey as fuck too. Ragnorak will eventually launch on KS and I'm not sure I need another slightly different copy of a $500 game. If only I was more into painting I would be set for life.

Black Rose Wars has gotten played a few times now. The English translations in the rules is kinda poor but you can muddle through. The game is gorgeous. The spell cards offer a ton of options and fuckery. It seems pretty swingy at the end game, but that isn't necessarily bad for a game of wizards trying to annihilate each other. Think Wiz-War but with more planning to your actions for each round.

Had a short intro play of Cloudspire. Can't say much as we only did half a game but it was really fun. Chips were nice and chunky, the factions seem sufficiently different, and it felt like a computer game kinda. Looking forward to another try.

Food Chain Magnate continues to dominate my month. Played maybe 4 times and an average game is now about 2 hours. I love how competitive and aggressive the game can be. Last game I super discounted all my sales for one full round and nobody else sold a thing. I didn't make much money, but they made none so still a win for me. Great game that really isn't that difficult to learn.

Taj Mahal by Knizia was...strange. I'd like to play it again to say whether I like it or not. Good interaction, cool mechanics, total trash of a theme though. As opposed to my recent play of Tigris & Euphrates where despite the simple pieces I am definitely in the "it is thematic" camp and enjoy it more because of that.

I got a random free copy of Cthulhu Realms recently, and have been playing it a bunch. It's fun, but it's exactly Star Realms with like 2 minor changes. Starting with some explorers in your deck is a good change, especially since the best cards in Cthulhu Realms are less broken than the best cards in Star Realms so grabbing one earlier isn't quite as deadly as in Star Realms. Adding more things for cards to trigger other cards from is also fun. Having less factions seems dubious, but dovetails with the more card triggers. You're punished slightly less for not going hard into one color than in Star Realms. Anyway, it's fun and it also has brought Star Realms back to the table a bunch in it's wake.

Scott_F wrote: Mythic Battles had a significant balance adjustment with the 1.5 version. Almost half the units had some kind of change, and it was all for the better. The minis are awesome, creating/drafting a team is great fun, and the gameplay offers the great option of either killing the enemy leader or grabbing the gems on the board for the win. Storing it sucks, I can never take it anywhere. And its pricey as fuck too. Ragnorak will eventually launch on KS and I'm not sure I need another slightly different copy of a $500 game. If only I was more into painting I would be set for life.

Black Rose Wars has gotten played a few times now. The English translations in the rules is kinda poor but you can muddle through. The game is gorgeous. The spell cards offer a ton of options and fuckery. It seems pretty swingy at the end game, but that isn't necessarily bad for a game of wizards trying to annihilate each other. Think Wiz-War but with more planning to your actions for each round.

Had a short intro play of Cloudspire. Can't say much as we only did half a game but it was really fun. Chips were nice and chunky, the factions seem sufficiently different, and it felt like a computer game kinda. Looking forward to another try.

Food Chain Magnate continues to dominate my month. Played maybe 4 times and an average game is now about 2 hours. I love how competitive and aggressive the game can be. Last game I super discounted all my sales for one full round and nobody else sold a thing. I didn't make much money, but they made none so still a win for me. Great game that really isn't that difficult to learn.

Taj Mahal by Knizia was...strange. I'd like to play it again to say whether I like it or not. Good interaction, cool mechanics, total trash of a theme though. As opposed to my recent play of Tigris & Euphrates where despite the simple pieces I am definitely in the "it is thematic" camp and enjoy it more because of that.

I'm not a Taj Mahal fan either despite really enjoying many of Knizia's designs.

Also - I have played MB:P and travelled with it. What worked well for me was narrowing the draft down to 40-ish RP in advance (which is how we've played thus far) and then just putting those units along with a pre-selected board/3D terrain into the main box and just taking that with me.

Taj Mahal never really hit for me either. I like the card mechanic a lot, but the scoring seemed disproportionally weighted towards goods (as the route building is really hard and almost impossible to not get blocked), and it's just full of bad feeling moments as you burn an entire handful of cards and get nothing. The routes don't even get blocked spitefully, it's just if you're going for a route it's extremely obvious, and if someone else places a piece before you do in that area they usually don't care where it goes if they're not going for routes so why wouldn't they block you with it.

Quick hits from game night last night:

Clowdus' The North - Clunky, some clever ideas, not sure I really want to revisit though.

Adventure Games: The Dungeon - Very neat. Closest thing we've gotten to a point and click adventure. Very TIME Stories-ish without the annoyance of looping, although a little more static. Story was solid.

Hellboy - Still good. Checking out The Wild Hunt expansion soon and wanted to get back into this one. We failed the second scenario although we had this really awesome moment where Abe and Hellboy drug a bunch of Frogmen into Liz's space and she exploded, dropping four dudes in one go. I was Johann, projecting around the board and investigating clues, but I ultimately was beaten to an ectoplasmic pulp.

Paper Tales - Fun. Better than 7 Wonders. Not amazing though and if I never play it again that's perfectly fine.

Silver & Gold - Very surprised. Really enjoyed this kind of roll & write where you flip a card with a Tetris shape and then everyone needs to mark off that shape on one of their personal treasure maps. It's a spatial puzzle with some race elements and attempting to complete as many maps as possible. Very fast and breezy, yet oddly compelling for such a quick filler.

Terraforming Mars with the missus, yet again. We tied in points 105-105, but she beat me by 1 Me in the tiebreaker. Harsh.

Played a second game of Scythe with my game group. I know we are a few years behind. I feel the game is firmly "okay". Nothing about it is super engaging or interesting, but it also has no real flaws. It just kind of happens and is very pretty to look at on the table. I would not turn down a game if others wanted to play, but I also do not feel I must get it to the table. As one of the players said, it never feels like you do anything because of how incremental the turns are. The map is too open with how limited movement is and combat always feels like checking a box on a list instead of gaining something. I would much rather play Cyclades in the same amount of time.

I've been making an effort to round up some locals to get into Cthulhu Wars so I can play non teaching games of it, as the first time through for a table is a little rough and that's the only way I've ever played it. Last night was the first gathering, and I think the Stars are right for getting into some good games of CW in the near future. I played red (no one has ever done well with red in my games, so I've been playing as them the past couple times to see if they click with me. I'd like to know what they're trying to do when things go right yknow), the others played as the other base game factions. First game for all of them.

Long story short:


Crawling Chaos learned the hard way not to leave your cultists hanging around the board once people have their GOOs in play and their economy did not recover fast enough for them to be effectively in the game after half of their cultists got captured in turn 2 (someone always does this in people's first games, no matter how much I stress to not let this happen during the teach. I think it's just something you have to see happen before it sticks I dunno. It sucks because it makes for not a great game for whoever gets their economy crippled).

Yellow Sign got off to a slow start, but things clicked by the last turn (in which he got 6 elder signs!) and I think he would be a strong contender next time he played yellow. If he had spun up a turn sooner and leveraged a few of his spellbooks better he probably would have won, as no one really messed with him much.

Cthulhu played a solid Cthulhu game, holding a power base of 3 gates and sending Cthulhu out on suicide missions every turn to weaken other people's positions and score himself points by resurrecting the big tentacle jerk.

For myself I finally figured out the Black Goat I think. Basically, pop Shub turn one, slow roll the next couple turns and expand your gates/get spellbooks (and opportunistically destroy people with Shub's teleport BS if they leave you the opening as they try to get set up), consolidate power around 3 gates, pump out elder signs with the sacrifice spellbook/rituals, tactically do what seems right re taking other people's stuff without overextending. Not sure how well that will hang together in the long run but it's the first time I've actually seen red do anything competitive so it seems like a good framework for now anyway.

Cthulhu and I both ended the game on the same turn (turn 5 I believe? Maybe 6...), with the Elder Sign Cthulhu got from his final spellbook putting him one point up on me to win 32-31. Was the best game of CW I've played yet, and everyone is in for a rematch in the near future. I think Blue needs to be present and holding back Cthulhu more next time around for the non combat factions to have a better shot once everyone has a couple games under their belt. I doubt he'll make the same mistake twice, so that seems likely. Hopefully these couple faction expansions will get in the mix at some point too.

Shub on turn one? Wild. I've seen him on turn 2 plenty of times but I don't know if I've ever seen him on turn 1. Usually everyone wants to get a second gate on turn one and foregoing that seems rough.

But yes, Black Goat does very well in our games. Get to three gates and form an impenetrable defense with Dark Young and Cultists that can fight. Then you cycle cultists for elder signs.

Turn 1 puts other people in an awkward position for turn 2, since you can teleport in anywhere they don't have a GOO and eat their cultists. And if you get the spellbook that makes your units cheaper you have a lot of stalling actions you can take while people spend their power and you look for openings. Plus you basically make up for the 4 power you lose from first turn summoning with the savings. I'm far from an expert though so take that all with a big grain of salt.

I've never tried summoning on round 1. Black Goat is my favorite faction, so I'll have to look at doing that next time.

I'm skeptical.

Capturing cultists is not great in general unless you have a lot of power. You gain literally nothing, instead you delay your power until the next turn (at the cost of the teleport power as well so you come out 1 behind, although you may nab a gate I suppose). It does hurt the opponent though.

If I was another player I'd be super happy if you teleported and captured someone else's cultist as it would hurt both of you from my perspective.

I also don't look at the delay in summoning Dark Young or Ghouls as savings because you have to spend it eventually.

You also can't stall too much because the only things that are free are ghouls, and you're down at least 2 power from everyone else at the table (3 power from anyone who summoned a High Priest which is what I would do as a soft counter if someone summoned a GoO on turn one).

By delaying the gate one turn you lose 2 power and 1 Doom as well.

Totally not saying this won't work or that you played bad, this is just my internal response thinking strategically.

I'm skeptical, but I do want to try it now to see how this plays out.

I always try the turn 2 Shub summoning these days: Turn 1: Sac 2 Cultists, take Red Sign, Summon Dark Young, move it, create Gate with Dark Young, get a Cultist. You'll have 10 power on turn 2 (5 Cultists, 1 Dark Young, 2 gates.) Turn 2: Sac 2 Cultists, Summon Shub, Get Thousand Young, then start summoning Cultists and Ghouls (for free) as the circumstances demand. But Shub on turn 1? Eh. I dunno. You're likely to be a long way behind and stuck there if an aggressive Cthulhu or Windwalker is around.

Taught Tyrants of the Underdark to a couple new players tonight. Every time I play this game, I find myself wondering why we don't play it more often. It's easily in my top 3 deckbuilders AND has the whole area control thing going on, too. Since I've been teaching it a lot lately, I decided to move away from the usual Drow/Dragon mix for new players (both of these people are experienced gamers) and suggested that we use the Undead, since I'd actually never played with that half-deck before. My suggestion was that my unfamiliarity with it might give them a little bit more of an edge than they'd have otherwise. Heh... Yeah... Not so much. I love this game and, consequently, am absolutely ruthless at it. I was earning VP off Gauntlgrym by my third turn. Undead is a little light on Promote effects and some of them are predicated with Devour actions, so neither of them really took advantage of the Promote action until late in the game (I pointed those cards out every time they came up in the market.) I kept pace or pulled ahead in every category but the Trophy Hall, where one of them racked up a 24(!), but I had 19 in my Inner Circle and had pretty much blanketed the NW corner of the board and won 92-77-71. I want to use the Aberrations deck, but that's definitely one that requires some experience with the game, as there are only three cards in it that give you Power. It almost requires playing with the Dragons, since they have the most Power-giving cards compared to the rest of the decks. Maybe that'll be the mix next time. Promotion will be tough, though.

charlest wrote: Quick hits from game night last night:

Clowdus' The North - Clunky, some clever ideas, not sure I really want to revisit though.

I have this and liked it but it has the eternal problem: I have so many 2p games. Would I pick this over something else? Would I pick it over Clowdus' Omen? I don't know. I knew when I backed it that it would have to blow me away to stick around and I can't say I was blown away, but I'll try to get some more plays out of it.